Education

Education and Manhood in Colonial America

In colonial America a basic education in literacy was widely available to boys, with the exception of slaves. This meant that education was a marker of white manhood in particular. But from the colonial era into the early nineteenth century, formal schooling ended early even for most white males, and the vast majority of boys prepared for agrarian or artisanal types of male work through individual apprenticeships and other direct training. Only the wealthiest went on to secondary schooling in grammar or Latin schools and then to private colleges—such as Harvard, the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), and William and Mary—to prepare for those careers marked in elite circles as manly (such as theology, law, and government).

Republican Manhood and Military Education

The early years of the republic saw the establishment of all-male service academies and military schools designed to instill such principles of republican manhood as citizenship, service, and sacrifice. Institutions such as the West Point Military Academy (established in 1802) in New York and the Virginia Military Institute (established in 1839) were designed to inculcate military models of American manliness that would oppose the “soft” commercial life of the nation. Yet the republican mistrust of standing armies and resistance to the formation of a dominating warrior class meant that an education in military manhood at West Point and schools modeled on it took on a distinctly American inflection. At West Point, cadets were selected from throughout the country, taught to obey civilian authority, and trained in civil engineering so they could help build the new nation.

Public Education and Coeducation in the Nineteenth Century

Beginning in the 1850s, a system of compulsory education in free public elementary schools, as well as secondary schools and universities, emerged alongside the older institutions. As formal schooling became more widely available, and as an emerging market economy produced a middle class that defined manhood in terms of upward mobility and economic and professional success, a boy was presented with clearly marked educational steps from elementary through secondary school, college, and professional training that signaled his progress from boyhood to manhood. The rite of passage to adult masculinity became (and remained through the early twenty-first century) the completion of set stages of formal education.

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